Yes, Iraq is rapidly evolving into a Jeffersonian utopia far beyond human experience. Freedom of speech, of religion, of the press!
According to Reporters Without Borders, five Iraqi journalists have been arrested by the authorities in the past two weeks alone.
The mayor of the southern town of Kawit ordered the arrest of Ayad Altmimi, the editor of the daily newspaper Sada Wasit, and journalist Ahmed Mutare Abass on 12 April. Ibrahim Al-Srage of IJRDA, an organization that defends Iraqi journalists, said the mayor requested an arrest warrant from his cousin, the town's public prosecutor, who responded by sentencing Altmimi to two months in prison and Abass to four months in prison for libel. The newspaper had carried reports about the constant violent crime and the shortcomings of the municipal authorities.
Well of course that's libelous! How could any fair and balanced reporter insinuate that there is constant violent crime in Iraq, or that municipal authorities there may have shortcomings? Certainly not the sort of top-shelf municipal authorities that call their cousins to prosecute such reporters.
It is reassuring to note that the highest standards of law enforcement and due process are part of this reawakening of Liberty's light in the cradle of civilization:
The first of the journalists to be arrested in this wave was Hussein Al Shimari, a reporter with the satellite TV station Al-Diyar, who was detained by Iraqi soldiers on 9 April in Dyala province, northeast of Baghdad, on suspicion of collaborating with the insurgents. His editor said he was tortured. He has not been allowed to contact his family, which has not received any word of him since his arrest.
On 20 April, several policemen burst into the home of freelance cameraman Hassan Walid Abdul Wahab, 23, who works regularly for the German TV station Zweites Deutsches Fernsehen (ZDF), arresting him, his two brothers (who do not work for the news media) and his father, a retired cinema operator in his 50s who was recently hospitalized with heart problems. A relative said that, as a pretext for holding him, the police suggested Wahab could be linked to the abductors of the Romanian journalists. A policeman today asked the family for 10,000 US dollars.
Police arrested Reuters Television cameraman Nabil Hussein on 24 April in the northern city of Mosul. Reached by telephone, Reuters spokesperson Susan Allsopp told Reporters Without Borders the police have not said what he is charged with. According to Reuters, Hussein's father was also arrested when he tried to visit his son a few hours after his arrest.
Describing the original arrest, relatives told Reuters about 20 police raided the home in the morning, beating Hussein, another journalist and their driver, before taking them to police headquarters in Mosul. The driver, Ismail Ibrahim, said the police "put sacks on our heads and beat us."